The Planeswalker's Stronghold

Periodically, this great game of ours finds itself in a position which requires a change. With Wizards recently announced back peddle to more stringently enforce the Reserved list, I believe the game finds itself at the precipice of just such a change. Brief History of Magic Formats: 1993 (290 cards) Magic debut with Alpha late 1994 (1 year, 9 sets, 985 cards) Magic deck construction rules are formalized and Standardized by the Duelist Convocation, giving birth to what would later be called type 1. late 1995 (2 years, 14 sets, 1,446 cards) Magic deck construction rules were officially split into 2 separate formats, Type 1 and Type 2. Type 2 was later called Standard, Type 1 Eternal. (Type 1.5 was also used to signify a format with which the type 1 restricted list was instead banned) late 1996 (3 years, 16 sets, 1,903 cards) Extended was created as a format. Standard had a rotation of approximately 1 year, Extended 2 years. 2002 (~8 years, ~45 sets, 6,056 cards) Standard and Exte...

This was a series of facebook posts made by the one the only Patrick Chapin. I'm pretty sure a few things are a bit out of order, and some of the facts have been simplified a bit, but it's mostly dead on! I hope you enjoy it as much as I did, and I really felt like it deserved to be saved. Did you know that Urza lost to Yawgmoth? Yawgmoth, who had fully corrupted Mishra in the first place presented Urza with the clockwork hell that had been torturing Mishra for thousands of years after his death and Urza bowed to Yawgmoth who then had Gerrard and Urza fight, Gerrard cut off Urza's head. Urza also had 9 Giant titan robots similar to battle tech that were driven by 9 planeswalkers, Commodore Guff, Tevesh Szat, Bo Levar, Daria, Taysir, Freyalise, Kristina, Lord Windgrace, and of course Urza himself. Like with Jesus and Judas, Urza knew Tevesh Szat would betray him and did not stop him. Unlike Jesus and Judas, Urza responded being putting Tevesh Szat inside a Nuclear Soul Bo...

It has become fairly well accepted that the magic story line will be diverging back to the Phyrexian threat by way of Mirrodin. Wizard's recent trade marks have made that a certainty. I thought this would be a good time to walk the path of history of just how Phyrexia became connected to Mirrodin, and where that connection is likely to lead us. Phyrexia is an artificial plane of entirely mechanical "life" created by an ancient planeswalker . Little is known of this planeswalker, aside from the fact that he preferred to assume the form of a dragon. There are many who believe that this dragon may be none other then Nicol Bolis himself, having created this plane for some purpose either abandoned, or yet to be utilized, or perhaps even forgotten by the monster during the crisis, and the reshaping. This would tie the two best established "evil" story lines in Magic into one unified set. The plane consisted of nine nested spheres, each with its own purpose and, o...

When Alpha first hit store shelves the concept of mana/spell color was brought paramount and reinforced with a number of cards. In the common slot White mages were given the Circles of Protection to fend off damage from spell/creatures/effects originating from a specific color. For the mere cost of 1w you could plunk down a reusable enchantment which could nullify the damage from a single source of the appropriate color. The Circles quickly fell into two groups, with white, green, and blue seen are worthless. CoP red and black were viewed as useful, but situational. These cards had the down side of only working on once specific color, so you had to draw into the correct color circle to be useful against your current opponent. Since this was long before the concept of sideboards, this often meant you had dead cards in your deck if your opponent was not in certain colors. Equally problematic was the drawing of multiple copies on the same spell, as there was no added benefit from a second...

Special thanks to the fine folks at MTGS .com for not only providing most of the content of this little history lesson, but also the inspiration. I have always been an avid learner of history. and I find that the history of Magic is no exception. I love to spend hours on the wiki learning new connections and interations of the story lines, and people which make up the Magic multi-verse. I have taken the liberty of leaving the hotlinks inthis article to take readers back to the source data. My intention is to give credit where credit is do, and to encourage others to spend some time in this digital library readingg about their favorite corners of the multi-verse. The planeswalker Nicol Bolas was the most powerful of the Elder Dragons to survive the Dragon War . He later became the emperor of Madara until he was defeated by Tetsuo Umezawa . Bolas most recently rose again near Talon Gate and defeated Teferi , and closed the Talon Gate Rift, escaping to a plane of his own design an...

Recently, I was involved in a conversation centered around what people thought was the best Magic set ever. One particular answer really struck me. It was his opinion that Ravnica was the best set ever made. Now this opinion is arguable and is probably a popular opinion among many, but it wasn't the answer itself, but the reason which struck home with me. He felt that this was the best set, because wizards had finally acknowledged enemy pairs for deck construction. Now clearly this is a post revisionist player. Long before there was Izzet, Boros, Golgari, Orzhov, and Simic, Wizards had told us a different story. This was the time before the great rules revisions, between Revised and Fourth when there were only 5 expansions to Magic. There was a story of a one eyed stranger in the city of Estark in the nation of Kush in the southwest portion of the Aerona continent of Dominia. It was the time of festival, when mages from all across the land came to compete. Most mages, like this str...